Various forms of storage systems are used today. These forms include direct attached storage (DAS) network attached storage (NAS) systems, storage area networks (SANs), and others. Network storage systems are commonly used for a variety of purposes, such as providing multiple users with access to shared data, backing up data and others.
A storage system typically includes at least one computing system executing a storage operating system for storing and retrieving data on behalf of one or more client computing systems (“clients”). The storage operating system stores and manages shared data containers in a set of mass storage devices.
Storage systems are being used extensively by different applications, for example, electronic mail (email) servers, database applications, virtual machines executed within virtual machine environments (for example, a hypervisor operating environment) and others to store data, protect the data using backups and cloning. Different applications executed within different computing system types have different requirements for storing information, protecting it by backups and then using restore procedures to restore such backups. Managing stored application objects and providing storage services, for example, backups, restore, cloning and other services in such an environment is a challenge. Continuous efforts are being made to better manage storage services.